Some American remakes are much better than the original films. There aren’t many, but they do exist. ‘Gaslight‘, filmed in Hollywood in 1944 by George Cukor, is one of them. The film reuses, four years later, the plot of a British film of the same name, which in turn was an adaptation of a play by the English writer Patrick Hamilton. Another of his plays, ‘Rope’, would be the starting point for a famous film by Hitchcock a few years later. While I’ve mentioned the master of suspense, ‘Gaslight‘ is a film that is part of the same thematic space that had already been approached by him, a genre of films in which men with criminal intentions (visible from the beginning here) exert a nefarious influence on the women they are in a relationship with, trying to destroy their psychological balance to the point of making them doubt themselves and their sanity. The play and the films inspired by it gave rise to a new term in English to describe this kind of psychological pressure – ‘gaslighting’. Hitchcock had already tackled the subject in several films, but here the direction belongs to Cukor, already a prestigious director by that time, in the second decade of a career that has spanned half a century. The differences in style are visible – for better or worse.
As in many other thrillers, most of the story takes place in a house full of stairs and mysteries. The exceptions are the scenes introducing the main characters, which take place in sunny Italy and the surroundings of the house in a wealthy district of Victorian London, which are almost always shrouded in fog. A murder that remained unsolved had taken place in this house ten years earlier. The teenager Paula had found the body of her aunt, a famous singer. Now she returns here with her husband Gregory, a musician she met in Italy. The couple’s seemingly comfortable and happy life and their two servants (elderly cook Elizabeth and young chambermaid Nancy) is soon disrupted by Paula’s deteriorating mental health. But are her inattentions or her little amnesias real? What is the source of the flickering gas lights and the mysterious footsteps on the upper – uninhabited – floor of the house? Viewers will soon begin to ask themselves questions, just like a Scotland Yard detective who has not stopped searching for the truth about the murder committed here a decade ago.
George Cukor created several memorable female characters, including that of Paula Alquits in this film. The young woman, who suffered a trauma in her adolescence when she discovered the body of her murdered aunt, longs for love and understanding, and she believes she has found them in the person of Gregory. It was a role that fit Ingrid Bergman like a glove at the time. The problem is that director Cukor was in love with the theatrical style of delivering lines on the big screen. As physically and expressively appropriate as Ingrid Bergman is for the role, the way she delivers her lines sounds as dated and artificial today. But probably for the viewers and critics of the time this style was appropriate, because the actress won the first of three Academy Awards of her career with this role. I’m not a big fan of Charles Boyer, but I also found him appropriate, inspired and brave in playing a negative role. The freshest and most interesting is Angela Lansbury, who debuted at 19 in this film, exactly 40 years before she became Jessica Fletcher in ‘Murder, She Wrote’. Watched today, the film gives more of the impression of filmed theater, but still a few elements of decor and props accentuate the tension and remind us of George Cukor, the great director:glasses of milk in dialogue as if with Hitchcock or the gas lamps with dimmed lights, which represent the symbol of fear but also the key to the mystery. ‘Gaslight‘ is a movie to watch or to watch gain.